Author Neil Gaiman, in a wide-ranging and complex talk, said people in
the book business needed to become more like 'dandelions', experimenting
by spreading numerous seeds around and accepting that most would fail.
"The model for tomorrow is try everything, make mistakes, fail, fail
better."
Gaiman took his analogies back to prehistoric days saying that print
books could be like sharks, an animal that evolution has never bettered,
but that there were still some dinosaurs in the business, for whom
digital could be the end. "Books (some) may be sharks", but "home
libraries" and "encyclopedias" were not, with both displaced by the web
and portable reading devices. He said he recognised that the e-book was
here when he daughter started reading off an early version of the Kindle
on a trip to Hungary where printed English-language books were not
available. For older readers he said the ability to increase font-size
was the "killer app".
Gaiman said we were moving from a world where gatekeepers were
necessary, to one where guides were essential. Gaiman said he would
"sign anything", and said discoverability was best achieved not through a
commercial transaction. "We don't normally find the people we love most
by buying them, we discover them." Gaiman said he never wanted to go
"to war" over this, instead he promoted "word of mouth".

Elsevier has two reasons to buy Mendeley. One is to squash it—to
destroy or coöpt an open-science icon that threatens its business model.
Many critics fear that’s the case. The other reason is to possess the
aggregated data that Mendeley’s users generate with all of their
searching and sharing. Mendeley is still growing, with two million three
hundred thousand users sifting through over a hundred million
references. Their use patterns reveal who is reading what, which papers
are popular, what lines of research are surging, which disciplines and
journals are crucial, and a lot of other extremely valuable information.
No one has that kind of data at the scale of Mendeley. Mendeley had
been selling access to segments of that data to publishers and other
institutions, including Elsevier, as part of its business model. Now
Elsevier owns all of that data. But if it wants users to continue
generating streams of data, the company will have to play nice, which
leaves it with something like the Facebook model: create software and a
huge social network in which people share information that it can
profitably harvest, and be just conciliatory enough about privacy,
anyway, to repel fewer people than it attracts.

One common link is obvious: powerlessness in the face of corporate
greed. But there’s another, slightly more subtle connection. When we use
online services to gather together and share information, whether it be
about our favorite romance novels, or most useful sets of bibliographic
citations, we create persistent and accessible agglomerations of data.
The more popular such services become, the more valuable that data
becomes, and sooner or later, a big fish is going to come around and
gobble it up. We personally may have never intended to sell out, but
together we managed to create something that was bound to be sold.
Inevitably, that data will be used to target us.

It appears that San Jose edX course is experiencing results similar to
when universities switch from boring old lecture-style teaching, to a
more interactive form. For instance, one University of California, Los
Angeles biochemistry class experiment found a roughly 18% pass rate
boost when it ditched lectures [PDF].
But, one-off experiments can often seem much more promising than
reality, once they are brought to scale. When new-age pilots are
broadened to environments with less-than-enthusiastic teachers and
students, things can fall apart.

In the Guardian John LeCarre speaks about the genesis of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold but thinking who Leamas may have been in today's world:

The merit of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, then – or
its offence, depending where you stood – was not that it was authentic,
but that it was credible. The bad dream turned out to be one that a lot
of people in the world were sharing, since it asked the same old
question that we are asking ourselves 50 years later: how far can we go
in the rightful defence of our western values, without abandoning them
along the way? My fictional chief of the British Service – I called him
Control – had no doubt of the answer:
"I mean, you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?"
Today,
the same man, with better teeth and hair and a much smarter suit, can
be heard explaining away the catastrophic illegal war in Iraq, or
justifying medieval torture techniques as the preferred means
of interrogation in the 21st century, or defending the inalienable right
of closet psychopaths to bear semi-automatic weapons, and the use
of unmanned drones as a risk-free method of assassinating one's
perceived enemies and anybody who has the bad luck to be standing near
them. Or, as a loyal servant of his corporation, assuring us that
smoking is harmless to the health of the third world, and great banks
are there to serve the public.

Slideshare Presentation Examples

Michael Cairns

Michael Cairns has served as CEO and President of several technology and content-centric business supporting global media publishers, retailers and service providers. He can be reached at michael.cairns@outlook.com and is interested in executive management and consulting, board and/or advisory positions. I am currently Managing Director with Digital Prism Advisors where we advise clients on digital and business transformation.

My career spans a wide range of publishing and information products, services and B2B categories and my operating and consulting experience has largely been with brand-name companies such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Macmillan, Inc., Berlitz International, AARP, R.R. Bowker and Wolters Kluwer.

I have served as a board member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and in addition to my responsibilities at R.R. Bowker, l also served as Chairman of the International ISBN Executive Committee.